


Where Do I Run? (I Run To You)

by Beguile



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Typical Violence, Drunkeness, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grief, Illnesses, Restraints, fight, poor coping mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:21:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28453797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beguile/pseuds/Beguile
Summary: Matt staggers out of Josie’s, drunker than he’s been since law school, and there’s only one place he wants to be.
Relationships: Frank Castle & Matt Murdock
Comments: 27
Kudos: 79
Collections: DDE’s 2021 New Year’s Day Exchange





	Where Do I Run? (I Run To You)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thesecretdetectivecollection](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesecretdetectivecollection/gifts).



> Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of Marvel and their related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.
> 
> Written for thesecretdetectivecollection as part of the DD/Defenders New Year's Exchange. I drew from a couple of ideas: the line, “I run to you,” from the song “Where Do You Run?” by The Score, “Ties” by Years and Years, and the request for Matt and Frank’s relationship/relationships. 
> 
> Special thanks to dichotomystudios, who beta-ed and got this ready for posting!
> 
> I hope you enjoy! Merry Fic-mas and Happy New Year, Readers!

* * *

Snow comes. It’s always warmer when it snows, meaning Matt’s coatlessness is less of a problem. The damp chill settles nicely against his skin. The tops of his ears, especially, are burning. He can feel his heart pounding around his skull like two hands trying to lock fingers in prayer, and the spark of snowflakes puts an end to whatever foolish church service his body is holding in the wee hours of a December morning.

He staggers to the corner, but he doesn’t make the turn. He isn’t ready to go home. The walls are too narrow, the air too stagnant, the rooms too quiet. The thought of his body armour strikes him as much the same: too narrow, too stagnant, too quiet. Too hot, frankly, which is his biggest problem, even though he’s got his arms wrapped around his torso now. Winter wind hits the sweat in his shirt, and suddenly Matt wishes he had a coat even if the hands commence their brain-crushing prayer around his skull again.

Traffic lights change. The pedestrian signal clicks. Matt lowers his arms as he passes some passersby. He puts his head down and plunges forward. Large clumps of snowflakes plume against his forehead and cheeks, dampening his shoulders and chapping his hands. He hears Josie calling after him about his coat but pretends that he isn’t who she’s looking for, pretending that there’s somewhere else he needs to be. Where would a person go if they weren’t Matt Murdock? _Home_ , he answers his own question unhelpfully, and then he wonders where he would live if he wasn’t himself, if it would still be New York. If it would be nice wherever he, not-Matt, lives. Maybe instead of stumbling aimlessly in no direction, drunker than he’s been since law school at least, he’d be moving towards something, moving towards someone.

He comes to the turnoff for Clinton Church. He can hear the stone walls. They have this dense, muffled quality that subdues the sounds around it. There is a vastness to the silence it emits, a giant void in Matt’s perception that would normally be welcome, that kind of _is_ welcome given how cold he’s getting. Maggie leaves the basement unlocked, the bed made, the heat running. She comes down some nights with tea and whiskey just in case he’s stumbled in. Might be nice: go unburden himself. But then he’d be darkness and silence too. He’d be stagnant air and vacant places. So his feet carry him across the street and away.

There’s less than a block between him and Nelson Meats, one of their many Christmas gatherings in full swing. Drinks are flowing freely, family and friends mill about on the sidewalk like they will every night until the big day. Matt stops, his head falling back slightly on his shoulders, his hands at his side, his chest tight. He should go to them. He wants to go. But he also wants that to be all. He wants the story to end the second he arrives, for there to be a comforting cut to black, instead of what there will be.

Matt wraps his arms around himself. He wishes there was a fight for him to break-up, but there isn’t one. People are indoors watching the snowfall, eating cookies and drinking cocoa and watching _A Christmas Story_. And if he wasn’t Matt Murdock, he’d be doing the same, because he wouldn’t have to think about all the stuff he wasn’t doing, all the right things he was avoiding by pitching himself headfirst into pints.

Dimly, sardonically, he thinks about other bad nights. Where does he go when a rib gets broken or a bullet cuts too close? There are locked doors everywhere, but Matt knows a place, and his feet, he realizes, have been carrying him there the whole time. He staggers with renewed purpose in the direction of a brownstone, the only one in a row that doesn’t buzz with electricity from outdoor lights. The only one with boards on the downstairs windows and an ominous quiet to the upstairs. The one that smells like heavy metal and fresh coffee and bad decisions. Matt scales the wall, not giving a damn who see him. He rips off his glasses mid-climb and drops them. He comes up to one of the windows and gently inches it open, fumbling at the corners for the wire he knows is there and dismantling the pithy security system.

He drops inside, forgoing stealth completely. He lets his footsteps hammer across the floorboards in a victory dance, lets the window slam shut behind him, locking him inside. His motions tell him everything he already knows about the space: that there are more traps lying in wait, but that he can avoid them easily. Detach a trip line from a sonic grenade, smash a couple of the motion sensors. By the time he gets to the ladder, Matt hears another set of footsteps below him, and his ears are ringing with excitement. Those hands folding around his skull in prayer are back, crushing his brain so tight that pressure around his skull crescendos in a dark hymn.

He kicks the ladder down and dives into the abyss, dragging all his sound and fury with him. Sound and fury rise up to meet him in kind. Matt ends up thrown to the floor. He grabs an arm, a neck; he kicks and hits leg, though all that accomplishes is him on the floor and a punch to his chest. He springs back up, swinging around, not even trying to win, just trying to keep the sound going, keep that emptiness at bay. He fills himself up with the pain of impact and the grim satisfaction of landed blows, and in the rare moments he’s held in a lock or pinned against a wall, the rest of the space is loud enough to cradle him. Artillery, coffee, boot polish; sweat and leather; a bullet press: Matt kicks out the banister and lets himself be hanged over the edge by the collar of his shirt.

There should be a gun. Why isn’t there a gun? Instead, there’s just Frank’s voice. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Matt grips Frank by the wrist, ready to swing a kick that’ll take them both to the floor. “I was in the neighbourhood.”   
  
He swings his leg up, but he never lands the blow. Frank dodges, then yanks him off the end of the landing and shoves him up against the wall. He kneels down on Matt’s leg, and it’s not the snap of a fall, but Frank’s bone grinds into his calf and thighs, and Matt tries to raise his leg just to feel something, to feel anything except the empty.

“Where’s your suit?” Frank asks.

Matt catches his breath for round two even though the bells are blaring in his head. “Didn’t need it. Not tonight.”

He springs up for a punch, and he misses again. Frank catches him by the wrist instead and swings him around, a move that wouldn’t’ve worked if he hadn’t been drinking (at least Matt doesn’t think so), that wouldn’t have worked if he didn’t secretly want it to (right?). Matt ends up face-first in the floor, all tied up in his own limbs, Frank’s hands and knees serving as the knots. He thrashes, but that only puts his shoulders more out of joint and his face deeper into the hardwood. His nose is close to breaking as he tries to twist out of the lock; his arms are about to dislocate; Frank could break one of his legs, and Matt wonders if he could get him to, self-loathing and anguish and utter meaninglessness waiting for him on the other side. 

Frank throws him before Matt can test the theory. Matt gets back up to try again. He’s shoved into the ladder to the attic, Frank’s forearm thrust against his neck. He punches and claws, trying to get more than just a strangling, but Fran either dodges or takes it. 

“What’s wrong?” Matt asks, smirking through the strangling. “You getting tired, Frank?”   
  
Frank’s grip on his throat loosens instead of tightens. He inches back, disengaging. “You drunk, Red?”   
  
“I’m-“

Frank yanks his arm back suddenly. Matt’s knees buckle, and he hits the ground, head spinning, stomach rollicking. The pain succumbing to all those beers he had, and then the numbness is back. Quiet comes in. That ringing in his ears cuts out, and he’s on all fours at Frank’s feet, dizzy and confused and desperate.   
  
“What are you doing here?”   
  
Matt jumps back up and throws a punch. Frank dodges it. He dodges the next one too, but he takes a kick to the stomach and pitches him forward.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Matt snarls.

Frank rises back to his full height. He stands there for a second in a silence so humiliating Matt wants to vomit. Or maybe that’s the liquor. He sways on his feet, a wave of nausea running through him so strong that he doesn’t notice Frank’s fist coming at him until it hits him dead in the face.

Silence and blackness follow. It’s awful, but Matt supposes it’s what he deserves. 

* * *

Snow on his face comes as a balm. He’s hot. The tops of his ears should be sizzling the snowflakes into steam, while the flush on his chest straight-up burns. Matt rubs his face into the cold, searching for more, but he finds it covers only one half of his face. And it isn’t so much snow as it is simply cold and wet and soft. A heartbeat drums on the other side, straight through Matt’s cheek into his skull. He pulls away, but the cold stays with him, pinning up against his face with the help of a callused hand on his other cheek.

Matt jerks back, wide awake suddenly. Not sober, not entirely, but not so drunk that he doesn’t notice his wrists and ankles zip-tied to a chair. He thrashes, successfully getting Frank’s hands off of him, but detaching himself from the chair is another matter entirely. The legs are mounted against the floor, leaving Matt thrashing uselessly.

Frank sits opposite, waiting. Silent save for that heartbeat of his. “Chair’s done up so guys who are bigger than you don’t pull it off the floor while I pull off their fingernails. You can dance around all night, but the only way you’re getting loose is I let you, so…you done?”   
  
“What are you doing here, Frank?” Matt demands. He pulls against the bonds, but the sting has its limits. His hands are going numb. “Who are you after?”

“Don’t talk like you’re in the suit,” Frank says. “Just who the hell do you think you are right now? You stumble in smelling like cheap beer, no coat, loose tie. You came looking for a fight and you found one and you lost. So I’m gonna ask you one more time: are you done?”   
  
Matt stops thrashing, but he does shake his head, set his jaw and say, “When I get out of this chair-“   
  
“When I let you out of that chair, you are going to go home and sleep off whatever the hell this is.” Frank leans back in his own chair, eliciting a long creak that echoes through the hollows of Matt’s chest. He feels the motion, his consciousness rocking on the long arc of the sound. His head pitches forward a moment, and he’s nearly sick, but he swallows that down for when he can get it in Frank’s face or something.

Frank comes back with the cold pack, shoving it against his forehead. Matt recoils, but Frank isn’t gone that easily. He clamps on hand on Matt’s scalp and holds him there till the heat loosens its grip on his skull. “So what the hell are you doing here?”   
  
“This isn’t the first time I’ve busted into your place.”   
  
“This is the first time you’ve done it drunk off your ass in civvies.” 

“Maybe I just like you.”

“Maybe you’re just an asshole.”   
  
“Yeah, well, maybe that too.”   
  
Frank releases him. The cold is gone too soon, replaced with that awful, drunken heat. Matt can smell the beer coming out of his pores, and he wishes he had just gone home even if he still doesn’t want to be there. Even if he doesn’t want to be anywhere.

Matt tries to keep things light. “Gonna start pulling out my fingernails, I don’t tell you?”

“You’d like that too much.”   
  
“Okay,” Matt says. He settles into the chair, limbs broiling even as the sweat in his shirt cools. “I’m done, Frank. You can let me go.”

“Why are you here?”   
  
“You tied me to a chair.”   
  
“Why did you come here?” Frank asks. “Why did Matthew Murdock, attorney at law, bust in through my attic?”

“I’m drunk,” Matt offers.

“Why?”   
  
“Because I was drinking.”   
  
“Why were you drinking?”   
  
“Because I wanted to get drunk.” This is ridiculous. “You want me out of your place? Let me go.”

“You want to go, you tell me why you got drunk.”   
  
“Look, we can play this game all night.”   
  
“Good. Let’s play.”   
  
Matt tests the zip-tie on his left wrist. If he could crack open his skin a little, the blood would help him slip out, but he’d need both hands free or Frank will just knock him out again.

“You were drinking. Bad day at the office? You lose a case?”   
  
Matt forces himself to nod. “Yeah, we lost a case.”   
  
Frank scoffs. “No, you didn’t.”   
  
“Yeah, we did. We lost. And I went out and got drunk.”   
  
“Nelson with you? Page? Your firm loses a case, whole team goes out together.”   
  
“Yeah, they were with me.”

But Matt’s missed the beat. He’s too late with the reply. And Frank knows it. “You go out with Nelson and Page ‘cuz of a lost case, you’re not fucking off to come to my place. You were drinking alone. You didn’t lose some case. Something happened. What?”

Matt clams up. Eventually, he’ll sober up, and he’ll snap the chair apart or get his hands bloody enough to escape. Or Frank’ll get bored of him and let him go.

Problem is, Frank isn’t bored yet. He’s interested. He’s still working this like an interrogation, giving Matt a kick to the legs. “Hey, you broke into my place. Plenty of other places you could’ve gone but you came to me. Why?”

Matt slumps more heavily into the chair. He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”   
  
“I left the bar. I started walking. I came here.”   
  
“Why?”   
  
Matt shrugs. He doesn’t know why, he only knows why not. “You break into my place all the time,” he says.

“Not like this. Ain’t never done this.” Not drunk, not in civvies. They come to each other bloody and alone, with wounds that need stitching or grievances that need airing or temporary alliances that need forging. Matt’s already shutting those thoughts down as Frank asks him again, this time without the kick, “Why?”

That emptiness in Matt’s chest moves up into his throat. He feels it on the back of his tongue, choking him. Tears spring up in his eyes. He tries to hide, but he ditched his glasses, and he can only turn so much in the chair. “You’re right. I was drinking alone.”

He waits for Frank’s scathing rebuke, but all he gets is, “Why?”   
  
“Because.”   
  
“Because why?”

“Let me go. I’m done.”   
  
Frank leans towards him. “Why?”

The proximity hardens Matt, steels him. “Because Foggy has cancer,” he snaps. “He told me, today, at work, and he made me promise not to tell Karen or his family, not to tell anyone. Said he wanted to wait until after Christmas.”

Frank is aggravatingly quiet. He shifts in the chair, pulling a knife from his belt. The blade snaps open. Matt winces. “Don’t…don’t cut me loose now, Frank. Geez.”

The knife gets stabbed into the arm of Frank’s chair, as if that was all he was going to do with it. “So your best friend tells you he has cancer, and you get drunk and come to my place.” 

Matt doesn’t have anything to say to that. He rides that last swirl of drunkenness, his mouth moving, words coming out of him, brain late to the party as usual. “I didn’t know where else to go.”   
  
Frank sighs. “You came here to fight?”   
  
Matt shrugs. “I didn’t think that far ahead.”

“You wouldn’t.”   
  
“I’m drunk.”   
  
“Like that makes a difference.”   
  
“My best friend is dying.”   
  
“Don’t you pull that-“   
  
Matt chokes, splutters. He tried to make a joke, but the sound of the words aloud, the way they hang there in Frank’s war room, the pressure on his wrists and ankles, that vice grip around his skull, _the emptiness in his chest_ : he bursts into tears. “He’s dying,” he says, weeping fully and openly onto himself. He tries to cover his face, but his hands are restrained, and he flails uselessly at the wrists, his breath catching in his throat, his heart tearing at his ribs. He can’t breathe, and he can’t think, and he can’t move, and Frank is there suddenly, holding that cold compress up against his eyes, and that’s when Matt really starts to sob.

He yanks on his arms, his legs, anything to try and get out of that death spiral his thoughts have entered. He knows grief so well that he’s already started the mourning process. But the sooner he starts isn’t the sooner it ends. He’s mourned his father for decades; he’s mourned Stick and Lantom and Elektra; he mourned his mother and still does sometimes. He’s not ready to mourn Foggy. Death’s supposed to teach loss, but Matt’s never learned the lesson except that loss hurts, and there’s nothing that makes the hurt go away.

Frank’s voice comes to him quietly, urging him to _breathe_. Matt finds that’s all he’s doing. The cold and the quiet exhaust him, and by the time Frank’s pulling the cloth away from his face, he really is done. He’s got nothing left.

“Cancer diagnosis doesn’t mean he’s gonna die,” Frank says in the same quiet voice. “Nelson’s not dead till he’s dead.”

“I’m not ready.”   
  
“Not about being ready. You think Nelson’s ready? He’s probably as shit-faced as you are right now.”

“I should be there. Be shit-faced with him.”

Frank grumbles something about how useless that would be – two friends shit-faced together, crying at Christmas, but there isn’t any menace in it, no malice. He’s tactful enough to say it quiet before asking, louder, “Then why’d you come here?”   
  
The comeback dies in his mouth. Matt’s tired. He wants out of the chair, and if he has to give Frank some kind of plausible answer, fine. “There’s nowhere else.” That should be the end of it, but his mouth keeps moving. “There’s nowhere else I wanted to be.”

Doesn’t mean he wants to be here, Matt mentally reminds himself.   
  
Frank rips the knife out of the arm rest of his chair. He’s got one of the zip-ties cut on Matt’s ankle before Matt can say, “No, Frank-“

The zip-tie on his other ankle goes. “You want out of the chair, you want to stay in the chair. Jesus, Red, make up your mind.”

His wrist comes loose. Matt grabs Frank by the front of the shirt, ready to take a punch, but Frank cuts his other hand free instead, then yanks him to his feet.

Matt sways, his legs rubbery, his hips loose at the joints. Head spinning so badly that his headache is a moving, living thing. Those hands around his skull aren’t trying to pray; they’re stirring shit up, traveling up and down his neck, into his chest. Matt lashes out, refusing to keep still. He wants that punch. He wants Frank to put him out.

Instead, Frank stands there with him, absorbing every shitty blow. Not fighting back. His heartrate doesn’t even change. Matt pulls back, looking to wind up, but Frank’s hands show up and keep him from getting any distance. He’s given just enough space to rage, but not enough space to do any damage.

“Fight me,” he says, “Fucking fight me. I broke into your place. I-“   
  
“You’re drunk.”

“I want to fight. I want you to fight me.”

Frank’s heartrate hasn’t changed. Matt slams his whole body into him, one last ditch effort to break Frank’s defences. But it’s really just the last of what Matt’s got. HIs knees give out. His head hits Frank’s shoulder, and he presses himself so tight into the knob where Frank’s clavicle meets his arm that his cheek should break or Frank should shove him off or both. But nothing. Frank’s heartbeat spikes, then settles, and Matt is just some dumbass with a stinging cheek who can’t even stand up by himself.

“He’s not dead yet, Red,” Frank says. “Not even sure if this is the end.”   
  
“Everybody dies.”   
  
“Not today. Not this minute.”

“But someday. And what that happens-?”   
  
“Cancer’s a big _if_.”   
  
“ _When_ it happens,” Matt says more forcefully, “What then?”   
  
Frank has an arm over his shoulder blades and another gripping his wrist so tight Matt’s more tied down than he was in the damn chair.

“Then you know where to find me,” Frank replies.

* * *

Happy reading!


End file.
